So, the sections you can select up above will take you to my individual sections of my personal history with the games. It is important to note that I have, like with SimCity at this point in my life, drawn a line of the games I care about, which are the fourth game through the sequel to the tenth. The sections will cover the history, so I figure there is a little more to cover which I will do here.

One thing that will become apparent over the course of the section is that Final Fantasy 4 is my favorite. It was my first and still somehow wins out. Not to say I didn’t like the others obviously. One thing that will though be hard to talk about in the sections is just the characters and, well, I guess culture of the game around the L street house and San Diego eras.

So let us begin with characters. While the Fourth game is my favorite, it was also a Super Nintendo game, so the character design was pretty plain.

Here an image of someone’s etsy magnets I think shows off the original character designs we had. Neat for the time and what was going on, but the draw then to the characters was their play styles. Edge was cool for having the ninja swords, Rydia summoned monsters. But it wasn’t like you bought a Edge poster and put it on the wall.

Also, likewise we had hated characters. No one line Edward the Spoony Bard, and Tellah was old, so yeah discrimination.

Final Fantasy 6 then was more of the same. Here is another etsy something off some of the characters from that title. I loved Mog and turning a character into the Imp and using the weird imp gear. But the design themselves, well maybe save Mog did require either looking at the Amano concept pieces or imagination.

Which is fine, but this was the same era were we had Chun Li.

When teenage boys are given the idea to fawn over a character in their video games. We have the maybe 32x32 pixels of Rosa, or the fully realized badass that was Chun Li. Rosa was pretty cool, she could cast the white(holy) spell and kill space monsters, but Chun Li looked like what you thought your future wife might look like.

So, while through high school, I loved the two games I had. It wasn’t like Ultros pushing the weight of the rafters was my desktop wallpaper. That stayed with Alicia Silverstone for a while, and then, likewise again I guess, I wasn’t drawing or imagining or getting merchandise around the games.

Then high school ends and Final Fantasy 7 makes it to the west. While the in game 3D models that got used some of the time were in line with the old Nintendo sprites, the combat and cutscenes took some of the mystery away and gave us a cool look at the design of the characters.

Now we had Tifa in a fighting stance that could tussle with Chun Li, and of course Sephiroth looking at us through the flames of Nibblehiem. The change in graphics changed the understanding of the characters themselves. Now it wasn’t just play style, but personality that helped belove a character. And so it was that Final Fantasy 7 also had the scamp of a ninja named Yuffie.

Yuffie was everything I liked. A ninja like Edge back in Final Fantasy 4, so play style fun, but also an obnoxious girl who kept stealing from your other party members. At the same time she was easily, from my playthroughs one of the more powerful characters. Interestingly around this time in the world, 1997, the cutest badass girl character was gaining some traction. Turns out I like that archetype. The same year gave us the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer with another spunky cheerleader would had super powers and killed demons.

While some people might be quick to point to this as some perverse male fantasy, I think the unexpected girl ass-kicker became appealing to a lot of us back then because we had just gone through a decade or more of the bodybuilder, chiseled chin, alpha male archetype as the stereotypical hero. And while I like plenty of Schwarzenegger movies it was nice to have some characters not just be the obvious choice.

This trend with me would pass on to the next game, Final Fantasy 8 and the somewhat remodeled Yuffie, Selphie.

Selphie though wasn’t a ninja, she was just a good friend that was a bit ahead of her time in that she well, was called Selphie. Humorously the characters personality, beyond the irrational love of trains, was just of a spunky classmate that, back in the 90s was posting her thoughts and journal online for everyone to read. She was, for all the characters in the game, the one that seemed most like a real person, who just happened to be a nunchucks expert and could fight the forces of evil. I think the love of trains was the extra kicker.

This was a character I could get behind, and it being the late 90s, and out of my high school shell I could really sell into the idea of having a favorite character.

Thanks to the hype of things like the new Star Wars movie, during 1999 it seemed like every license had action figures. If you have followed my history at all by now, you know I got sucked into the hype and connected with my dad and then later Jen through some avid toy buying, especially at this time. So, the new Final Fantasy games damsel not in distress was a cool figure to be able to get.

This is really when the change of just liking the games, and having Selphie wallpapers or helping Jen find her missing Guardian Force action figures at Comic Con became a reality. This is also what spawned ideas like the Adventures of Bossk and Selphie:

Combining my love of Star Wars with Final Fantasy in really bad self-fulfilling fan fiction, I guess. Because I do get it, weird fan team up fantasies are pretty dorky and the plots ill-conceived and almost always show a disconnect from the actual source material for weird fantasy fulfillment. It was weird being sort of an intense during this time and also noticing how, well dumb a lot of it was. But if imaging the two of them slicing through stormtroopers, chasing down bounties and one maybe having an unhealthy lust for teen heartthrob Palpatine propaganda expands my universe, I guess I am down.

Also, during this time from the late 90s into the next millennium we had the revolution of the mp3. Since it took corporate America a while to catch up and find their way to heavy hand the market, for a while their exploring music was just something the computer did for you in the background. Which allowed the picking and choosing of any songs, even stuff of video games.

Final Fantasy 8’s succession of witches, along with Photoshop is probably one of the stronger digital catalyst for Jen and I having a relationship during this time. Once I had Jen indoctrinated to the Final Fantasy soundtrack this also became a point of “collecting”. I think that is a better term than hording merchandise.

I had of course grown up with punk and some metal, and albums like that. But soundtracks, that wasn’t a thing when we had to buy CDs. Save it for the fact I loved Star Wars so much I had a CD copy of the Empire Strikes Back basic soundtrack on rotation with Soundgarden and the Germs in the mid 90s. Now with mp3s I could find more soundtrack, well tracks, and with having the support of Jen wanting to find the extremely expensive import CD versions, we have two dummies listening to a lot of fight songs from a turn based Japanese role playing game.

It was an interesting skew from, especially junior high me and then new millennium me when it came to what I was listening too. No longer listening to whatever seemed as edgy as possible, we were listening to what Japanese composer Nubou Uematsu was thinking Squall thoughts on maybe being the lion.

This shift I don’t really seem to get to in describing what went on around the games and playing them. Because this was almost outside the games themselves. Jen and I went to an Uematsu concert during, I want to say, Comic Con 2005 called Dear Friends. I think at that time I wasn’t playing any of the games, but the music and doing things related to the games I did like was just part of what I would be willing to spend money on.

That’s why I decided like Star Wars, Final Fantasy needed a section of its own. Both now have their place as part of my personality. And even though a lot of the newer things I am not down with, you post a new Selphie art, I might check it out. I have liked also what I have seen of the Final Fantasy 7 remake, so there is still something there. I think it was just like the Disney trilogy Star Wars movies, Final Fantasy changed some things to fit “modern” audiences, which to me changed what it was to like those things. It’s just sad to me that we have to deal with Rey Palpatine and instead of getting a Selphie returns game we have to find out Lightning returns.

Honestly, I did watch a playthrough of Final Fantasy 13, and didn’t hate it like I disklike the new Star Wars trilogy. But now that they have really lifted the veil of making sequel games and stuff for the Final Fantasy franchise, it would be nice to not get only stuff I don’t care about. Or even more so, things like trying to bring back dead characters for sad fans from days gone by. If your going to use old IPs, go in new directions, maybe Selphie falls in a dimensional portal and ends up in the Star Wars galaxy, just saying.